Ungoverned Spaces

When Rae and I first arrived in Tumbes, Peru, I asked people where the cockfights were and nobody seemed to know, which was weird because once we figured it out for ourselves, wandering around the market and the cemetery and the Plaza de Armas one Sunday afternoon, reading pamphlets and following crowds of people, it…

At roll call, the deputy chief assigned me to Officer Murphy. I don’t know if Off. Murphy was happy to have me tagging along all night on his patrol, but probably not. On the other hand, a lot of people like to talk to reporters. There were hours of just driving around, Murphy’s head on…

In Waco Texas, my friend and I got picked up by a guy in a hatchback who looked exactly like David Koresh. Couldn’t have been him though because Koresh had died in 93 and this was a couple years later. Sure was weird though. Maybe they were related. We were hitchhiking down to Austin because…

In North Carolina a rowdy bunch of gamblers on their way to a casino at the reservation picked me up and laughed about how they saw some sucker sleeping on the shoulder of the road some days before. Boy they sure yucked it up when I told them that was me. Somewhere in Tennessee another…

I hitchhiked from Phoenix to San Diego one winter night with a boot knife in my pocket and a cardboard sign that said San Diego Please. The driver preached and prophesied to me the whole way, in hopes that I’d find Jesus somewhere in the Sonora Desert on Route 8 near Yuma. I wasn’t much…